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What I Learned from Joe Campbell

Renowned
Comparative
Religion scholar
and mythographer, Joseph Campbell was the Great Teacher and "wise old
man" in the life journey of gay novelist, spiritual writer and former
White Crane editor Toby Johnson.

For five summers during the early 70s, Johnson
was fortunate
to
have worked on staff at a Jungian oriented conference center in
Northern California called The
Mann Ranch Seminars. There he met and
befriended Joseph Campbell. He corresponded with Campbell for over 10
years.

Johnson writes:

I was in grad school at CIAS
in Jungian Psychology in San Francisco in 1971. I saw a notice on the
bulletin board that Joseph Campbell was giving a seminar at a
conference center in Ukiah California called the Mann
Ranch.
I’d read The Hero with a Thousand Faces a couple of years before and it
had opened my eyes to the nature of religion. I wanted to go. Being a poor hippie flower-child student in those days, I
applied for a
work scholarship and so was asked to come up early. I hitchhiked the
hundred miles to Ukiah on Thursday, the day before the weekend seminar.

Campbell also arrived early and I had the chance to meet him personally
and make friends. After the seminar I was invited to join the Mann
Ranch Seminars staff. First at the Mann Ranch, then at the
"Reminding" lecture series at Dominican College in San Rafael and as a
volunteer for Barbara McClintock, Campbell's major contact on the West
Coast, over the next ten years, I was on the team that put on Joe’s
talks in Northern California. And I corresponded regularly with him in
thoughtful, mostly handwritten letters. Joseph Campbell was the Wise
Old Man in my personal hero journey.

Here's
a photo I took of Joe
lecturing on the front
porch of the Mann Ranch rambling old ranch house.

———

There’s an Austin
connection.
Betty Sue
Flowers at the University of Texas edited the book The Power of Myth
from the 1988 TV series with Bill Moyers that made Campbell famous.
That’s the year Kip and I moved to Austin to take over running Liberty
Books.

We first saw The Power of Myth in a series of very
well-attended public showings Betty Sue Flowers hosted at Tarrytown
United Methodist.

Joseph Campbell is known for his aphorism Follow Your Bliss. “If you
follow your bliss,” he said, "you put yourself on a kind of track that
has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you
ought to be living is the one you are living… Follow your bliss and
don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn't know there were
going to be doors.”

Toby is author of the book The Myth of the Great Secret: An
Appreciation of Joseph Campbell. Here's an excerpt.

Joseph
Campbell was not
himself gay,
though he lived most of his life in a little two-and-a-half room apartment
on the 14th floor of a
building on Waverly
Place and Gay Street overlooking New
York City's Sheridan Square and Christopher Street. Perhaps he
watched from his almost monastic-like urban aerie as street riots
ensued from the police raid of the Stonewall
Inn in 1969. Though enthusiastically in love with his wife and
delightfully ribald at times about heterosexual attraction, in some
ways he lived like many a gay man. He was a college professor and
scholar. His wife, Jean Erdman, was an illustrious choreographer on
the New York scene. They were certainly both acquainted with the
sophisticated gay art world. From early on, they agreed not to have
"earthly children," but only "spirit children": books and plays and
creative productions. They chose a lifestyle other than normal
heterosexual family life for the sake of a larger contribution.

Campbell's all-inclusive ideas and his lovingly
irreverent
sarcasm toward religious institutions provide a framework for
understanding religion that gay people can readily embrace.

Keeping alive this vision is the work of the Joseph
Campbell & Marija Gimbutas Library on the campus of Pacifica
Graduate Institute near Santa Barbara. Membership in the Library
supports the kind of revolution in religion most of us seek. Write
Campbell & Gimbutas Library, 249 Lambert Rd, Carpinteria CA
93013. (Toby Johnson is proud to report that two of his books are
included in Campbell's library, positioned on the shelves just as Joe
left them.)

The Joseph Campbell
Foundation
also supports and encourages Campbell's wise understanding of religion.
The Foundation offers internet-based conversations about Campbell's
vision. Please consider supporting both the Library and the Foundation.

Campbell is most
famous
for his
advice:
"Follow your bliss."

If we gay men were not actively following our
bliss, we'd
never
have come out in the first place.

Joseph Campbell
said, "People ask me: 'Do you have optimism about the world, about how
terrible it is?' And I say, 'It's great just
the way it is.' What else can you say?"

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.